


Home

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Religion, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-20
Updated: 2009-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mello would hate him, if only he were capable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of a gift for [Recipe For Insanity](http://www.fanfiction.net/~recipeforinsanity).
> 
> Thanks to [Saint Sentiment](http://www.fanfiction.net/~Saint_Sentiment) for help with choosing an appropriate title for this story. And to [Chamyl](http://www.fanfiction.net/~chamyl) for motivating me to actually finish it.
> 
> This story is AU: the Kira case never took place, and Mello is a young man.
> 
> Spoilers for real names. Unbeta'd.

_Oh God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed; Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give._

~ Evening Prayer, Second Collect, The Book of Common Prayer, 1662.

*

The rosary, wrapped amongst his slender fingers, hangs as heavy as lead. It's strange, the way that it does that when, in reality, the thing is carved from such soft, light wood. L had brought it home with him one Christmas, years ago, handed it to Mello with an almost sheepish smile, and a shadow of something more, and then had shuffled away down the hall, leaving the boy alone to unwrap the cloth in which it had been bound. The rosary had smelt of sweet pine, and fine, pale wood-shavings had still clung to its back; Mello had never been given a better present in his life.

Now, though, so many years later, Mello looks at it, and looks at L, and feels the ache of no longer being a child, the pain of not being on equal footing with the other adults, and the weird discombobulation which was in-between – God in Heaven, _discombobulation__?, _how does he even think this shit up, clearly he'd spent too long in Near's company when they'd worked that case in Scotland; whatever. Mello shrugs, and gazes at the rosary, its chain worn thin where he usually hangs it from his jeans and tucks it into his pocket, and wonders what God really thinks of him nowadays, anyway.

Mello is in L's study at Wammy's House. He's sitting and waiting, because the detective had told him he could come and speak – _Mello clearly has something he wishes to say to me, does he not?_ The night is cold, and L has his knees pulled up to his chest, as always, where he's perched on the sofa closest to the fireplace. His bare toes twitch, now and then, as he turns a page (what's he reading? he's reading Dickens) and processes whatever thoughts happen to run through his mind when he's absorbed in a world of Victorian make-believe. Mello watches him, and counts beads – the wood of them polished by the passage of time, a craftsman somewhere in Patagonia, and his own fingers – counts beads, and counts his own heartbeat, and how many steps there are separating himself from the reading man by the fire.

He isn't even conscious of the fact that he actually _has_ risen to his feet, and crossed the distance himself until, abruptly, he realises where he's standing.

L tips his book down a little way (he holds it by the uppermost corners of its covers, as though he thinks it might start nibbling at his knuckles), and peers at the younger man from over the top of it. He seems vaguely surprised to see Mello standing there, and perhaps he has forgotten that they were even in the same room, with the shadowed corners of his study whispering around them, and the clock ticking monotone from the PM towards the AM. Mello wouldn't be at all astonished; he's never seen himself as particularly memorable, despite the striking figure he cuts with his black nails and his mocking eyes – after all, that's why he does it, isn't it?

Now he raises the rosary with one hand, and lets it slide between his fingers, and around, watching the wood glint in secret communion with the fireplace, before pulling it up with his thumb, only to release it again. Jesus, carved in fine silver, and his nose a little bruised by all these years, stares up at him from the eternal agony of betrayal by his father, nailed, as he always has been and always will be, through the palms.

There are days when Mello wonders, closet heretic, whether the ending of the story hadn't been tacked on by some well-meaning disciple, and maybe Christ never left hell at all.

(Bedtime stories and security blankets).

He doesn't even know what God would call him nowadays, if he really _can_ see the thoughts inside his head.

Mello stands there before L, his own feet bare on the rug beneath the frayed cuffs of his black jeans. He swings the rosary like a hypnotist, completely forgets what he came here to talk about in the first place and demands, instead, his voice as calm as the clock's ticking fingers, "Do you believe in God?"

Dickens is placed upon a table – no bookmark, because L could remember something so simple as a page number from now until his death, if he chose to – and the detective gazes up at Mello from beneath his mess of dark hair. He's a trinity himself, really, the world's three greatest detectives rolled into one, and which of them is real, if any? He's untouchable, and Mello loves him so much, but what good does it do him?

L, just like God, belongs to the ranks of the untouchable. He's always away, always leaves Mello behind, never gives him even a corner of the crust when it comes to travelling, and keeps all of the blond's cases upon European soil. And, sure, he sits with him, like this, when he's home at Wammy's, but it's as though he doesn't trust the young man to get to far away.

(Mello would hate him for it, he really would, if only he were capable of it).

"I believe that there is more to life than that which the human eye can detect," L answers, slowly, his words carefully chosen, as if he knows that his opinion on the topic might actually matter; as if he can look beneath the dark shirt and the pale skin of the young man before him; as if he can see the questions rolling there, the doubt, the desperate need for faith, the longing psychologies which cling to a Nothing which must be an Everything.

L places his thumb against his lips and tips his head to one side. "I prefer not to consider the universe as being beneath the control of one omnipresent being, however, because, if that were the case, then I would be forced to judge said being as extremely inept. Besides, better to have a broken world with shining fragments, than a shining world which is then shattered to pieces, eh?"

Mello thinks and does not think; grips at his rosary until the silver chain, between the beads, begins to dig into his fingers. "So, no God?" he questions, like a dog with a bone, and his own universe hangs upon a tarnished thread as L's eyes meet his own, and he sees them _consider_.

The detective's toes move in a little dance amongst themselves, like bees discussing the weather. He looks away, looks back, looks down, finally glues his gaze back upon the blond's and says, unblinkingly, unerringly, "If Mello believes that there is a God, then, for him, there is."

The younger man's fists clench and release; he lets the rosary slip-slide against his palm, but catches it smoothly before it can fall. He would give anything, anything, anything at all, to just not care. He doesn't know. He thinks L is right. He thinks L is wrong. God must be God whether you believe in him or not, or how else is he God? But how can anything exist unless someone validates it by belief? Does _he_ even exist, stuck here, wandering the halls of Wammy's House even after his childhood is over, solving petty cases, teaching small children calculus purely because the boredom beats at his brain otherwise... wishing he could leave, and yet afraid to, because this is the one place L always returns to, this is L's home, and L is... L is something more than someone like Mello can have.

(He loves him).

There's chalk dust on his sleeve, from explaining about Foucault's pendulum to a group of shrill-voiced little girls. He'd come straight from the classroom to L's study, stalked his way through the hallways, determined, now, to finally demand a real case of his own.

Near is in Paris, after all, and soon to be in Quebec.

But Mello has forgotten that that's the reason why he's here, because L is before him, has forgotten...

"Mello," says L, and beckons him forwards. Mello moves without thinking; L brushes at the white-yellow chalk, his hands deft and soft and gentle against Mello's arm, and then his fingers close in a circle around Mello's wrist, the wrist of the hand that holds the rosary. "Mello," he says again, and the expression in his eyes hurt Mello's insides so badly that he actually flinches and looks away. "You have to believe what you have to believe," L whispers, his grasp tightening, his thumb brushing circles along the side of Mello's hand. "But you cannot let it kill you. Faith should make you whole, not break your spirit; love you, not destroy you."

"Love me?" repeats Mello, and he wants to mock and laugh and roll his eyes, and he wants to protest and debate and shred the concept. But he's also weak at the knees, and he doesn't know how that happened. The hand which is holding the rosary is stinging, and his other is clutching at the arm of L's sofa.

L breathes out, blinks once, and then moves suddenly, his legs sliding from their habitual position at his chest and dropping towards the floor, his shoulders leaning forwards and then, and then, he puts his hands on Mello's waist and pulls him in closer.

Mello can't think at all, just lets himself be held, lets himself be shifted gently; h_e's sitting on L's lap_. L's arms are tight around him. It's like returning to childhood, returning to sanity, and he presses his face sideways against L's shoulder and tells himself that he isn't really crying, because crying is for weaklings, though the dampness of the white shirt beneath his cheek is calling him a liar. "I just..." he says, "I just..."

He doesn't even know what he's trying to say.

If he could just hate L, he theorises, everything would be so much simpler.

(He's tried).

But instead he lets himself be held, and feels like he's come home.

The room is warm, and L's embrace is warmer, and the clock and the wood-fire have conversed their way to one o'clock before Mello turns his face again, and scrubs at his eyes with the back of a hand. He realises, vaguely, that he doesn't feel half so embarrassed as he would have thought he would. Maybe it's because L is still holding him comfortably, as if a sniffling nineteen-year-old man were the most natural thing in the world. The detective is murmuring things which Mello can't even make out, because they're being spoken in too low a tone – is that French? – and he's rocking backwards and forwards, just a fraction, as though the movement does him good; as though Mello were a small child in the wake of a nightmare. It's a garish thought, but somehow Mello doesn't give a shit.

His lips are so close to L's neck that he can taste the flavour of his skin when he smiles wryly and asks, "Can you think at all when you're sitting like this?"

Mello can sense L's grin, rather than see it, and then there's a brush of dark, silky hair against his face.

"Not that well," the older man admits, and shifts slightly, beneath Mello's weight, as if to expand upon the concept.

The blond remains still for a moment – he can hear L's heart beating beneath his loose shirt – and then he speaks, against bare skin, whispers, "If you shifted a little bit, you could pull your left leg upwards, and still hold me."

When L's heartbeat does something strange in response to Mello's words, it doesn't go unnoticed; the blond wants to put his hand in the middle of the detective's chest, to better feel the motion, and so that's exactly what he does do. They're so hushed now, the pair of them, as silent as they'd been when Mello was angry, and L was reading, but it's a different breed of quiet. There's a texture to it, an expectancy, a _waiting_, and suddenly a dozen things become clear inside Mello's mind. This is what he's been so angry about. This, and what L would make of it, and what God would make of it, this, even though nothing has even happened yet, but now there _is _ a 'yet', and perhaps there always was... perhaps there has always been this moment, and everything else has just been leading to this point in time.

(This is what matters).

And, perhaps, just perhaps, L has always known, because there's something about his face, something about expression, which is kindred to the way his pulse had skipped; either way, he simply nods in silence, and shifts on the sofa, so that he has his back against the side of the lounge, and one of his knees draw up, and Mello still warm against his body; still held in his arms.

"I didn't think... I didn't think you actually _would_," Mello observes calmly, as if his entire existence hasn't just taken a quantum leap from A to B in the same quantity of time it took the clock to move from two-past to three-past.

L has his face against Mello's hair, and his fingers are creeping up and down Mello's side, his thumbs moving black cloth out of their way, so as to better stroke at bare, warm skin. "I know," the older man says. "That's why I never have."

Mello leans backwards, just a little way, and stares at the detective. He wants to narrow his eyes, wants to pull away, even now, because he cannot believe, yet cannot disbelieve, and the paradox is tugging at his soul. "You always leave me," he finally mutters, sounding like a petulant child and, worse, aware of it. "But you never let me go..."

L's thumbs reach Mello's ribs, and start to count them; Mello shivers beneath their ministrations.

"I've always been selfish," admits L simply, as if that ought to have been the most obvious thing in the world.

(His hands make claims of possession).

For a second, just a second, Mello really does manage to hate him, for the first time in his life, but the spark transmutes itself before he can express it and, somehow, God-only-knows somehow, he finds himself saying, "I came here to make you let me leave, you know. But I won't be able to, will I? Not the way I'd planned... But you don't have to keep me here to see me, L. I'd go anywhere with you, if you'd take me."

And the detective pauses for a moment, his fingers stilling in their exploration of Mello's torso, and his eyes pained. "I wanted... I wanted to _not _be selfish. I was... I was waiting for Mello to want..."

"To _want_?" Mello repeats back at him, dumbfounded. It's like whispered games from childhood; it's like dreams and music; it's like the clock on the wall so busily propelling the world through time and space. It's like everything and nothing, and so damn simple that it makes him want to laugh. He sits up properly, not pulling away, exactly, but straightening himself where he sits, between L's legs. He chews at his lip for a second, then actually does laugh, and slips his rosary over L's neck. "I've always want you, you idiot," he whispers, as if he were the one talking to a child, his lips caught up and grinning, and his hands brushing L's dark hair back into place. "You're my _home_."

Home, home, home, trinity and unity, and Mello raises himself yet higher onto his knees. He kisses L's temple, then trails his lips along the man's face; feels the way L's heart reacts, feels the way L's hands flex and press closer in their possession of his skin. When Mello puts his own hands against L's face, L just leans into the touch, and sighs. The blond's mouth has already brushed at the corner of L's mouth, when he pulls back again, and hisses, "But I'm only Mello, you know." _I'm Mello, and I'm not Near, and I'm not a woman, and I'm not―_

L stares down at the rosary, then gazes up at Mello, and shakes his head. "No," he says. "You're Mihael Keehl."

When their mouths meet, warm and damp and just a little bit rough, Mello realises just how long it is that he's been waiting to hear those words.

And, by the time that night has spun itself into a blur of bare skin and licked sweetness, he's not sure he even cares, anymore, what God calls him, so long as this is the sound that L makes when they're together; so long as this is the way that L moans his name.

Faith is love is love is home.

(Home is L).


End file.
